Fiction

We're back. And I think we're in Itsuki's house. What bothers me though is that Mikuru, who's been carried here by Itsuki, looks like she's just gotten out of the bath. Maybe we're supposed to think that she was given a bath by Itsuki while she was unconscious? You've got to be kidding me! Then this would be the point where anyone's doubt turns into a white hot rage, building into a desire to kill. But for now, I will not give it much thought, doing away with all the emotions that might be bubbling up. We are, after all, just watching a movie with actors playing characters. This isn't reality, right?

Creators

'Oh, by the way,' he said, 'what do you call yourselves?' Well, we looked at him and Mister Stephen J. Butts here looked at Kenny Greengrass from New York City when asked 'what do you call yourselves' and said: 'The Clansmen.' The Clan — Kenny turned absolutely white. And Butts said: 'With a C. With a C!'

Reviews

Our fox and hound find their long friendship thoroughly obliterated and end up trying to kill each other. Only after the member of the pursued and persecuted race does a favor for his oppressor (when the hunted saves the hunter's life) does the hound grant the fox permission to continue living.

But not as equals; the hound returns to his home with the humans and the fox returns to the wild.

That is how we will heal our racial and socioeconomic differences: by separating ourselves. If only we could institute some kind of 'segregation' where all of us could be with our own kind, none of this unpleasantness would happen.

There’s also a truckload of unfortunate gender issues and semi-Freudian father-son stuff going on that would require a whole other, longer essay to enumerate. Just to preview quickly: all the characters are explicitly labeled via caption. The one character labeled 'wife' is raped and murdered. Two out of three of the characters labeled 'father' kill each other after reuniting with their estranged sons. And the one woman labeled 'divorcee' is revealed to be a violent psychopath. Whenever she engages in or discusses this violent psychopathic behavior, the comic always shows us a close-up of a magazine cover picturing her, with the words 'On Divorce' printed big. There’s oh so much more.

...But let's close this review with a revisit of that lovely matter of racism that's been hanging around like a bad smell. RE5 actually does a lot to defer that accusation: your partner is black (a bit), quite a few whiteys are scattered throughout the early hordes, and real effort has been made into a somewhat realistic and sympathetic depiction of modern Africa.

But one really shouldn't worry about this sort of thing unless there's genuine hatred behind it, and I don't get that impression. Capcom aren't bad people. They're just IDIOTS.

—Zero Punctuation on Resident Evil 5note One thing Zero Punctuation missed is that there's an in-game justification for this; the pathogen of the game (Las Plagas/Uroboros) causes the infected (Majini) to revert to a tribal mentality, complete with using traditional, obsolete weapons. However, this is only stated in an optional file which is entirely possible to miss, and even then, it does not really sidestep the Unfortunate Implications involved.

The Kazon are an uncomfortable creation. They were described in early production documents as akin to gangs. It is later revealed that they used to live as slaves, and it’s suggested that the entire Delta Quadrant rued the day that they earned their freedom. Seven of Nine later dismisses them as too primitive to be worthy of assimilation.

In the context of a frontier narrative, the Kazon read like an incredibly racist creation – a bunch of primitives with dark skin living in the desert and existing as an obstacle to our heroes. The attempt at commentary on Los Angeles gangs only compounds the issue, with all the unfortunate racial profiling that went into coverage of gang activity in Los Angeles during the nineties coupled with a history of slavery that makes it seem like they were constructed for analogues for a particular ethnic group. It’s very clear from the outset that Voyager is running on some of the more awkward and outdatedStar Trek clichés, particularly when it comes to the portrayal of alien races.

"All those who feel that stereotypes aren't an issue when creating fictional groups for game purposes are free to take part in playtests for my new game Sambo: The RPG of Stealing Chickens and Eating Watermelons.''"

"It dehumanizes men by portraying them as immature schlubs whose biology renders them incapable of any form of emotional connection. It dehumanizes women by putting them on a pedestal, holding them to impossible standards and then accusing them of having special advantages that they actually don't. It trivializes male-to-female transsexualism by turning it into escapism for men who want to have pillow fights, and erases female-to-male transsexualism because it's not fun. Most ironically, by adhering so rigidly to sexist stereotypes, it just perpetuates the same men-who-like-knitting-are-pathetic-fags attitude that inspired the whole thing to begin with. Just to rub it in, it later turns out that feminists are evil.

Basically, no matter what your gender or your sexuality, this comic treats you like shit."

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